The Spirituality of Materialism

 Okay so, I've said it before, I'm going to start a new series. And, they fizzle out. We'll see this time. 

Lately I have been inspired by Robert Sapolsky and others to see the world as a long series of amazing events, too many for one brain to hold. 

I'm past the "I debunk everything" stage of non-belief and into, well, that's what the series is for, into what? We'll see. Many people go through a year or more of anger when they feel they have been lied to all their lives. Some never get over that. I'm over that. Some get just as fundamentalist about their new belief system as they were before. It's merely coincidence that they are scientifically accurate. Anyway, there are a lot of people in the world. I'm interested in finding common ground. 

Here's the phrase that I woke up with the other day,

My spirituality comes from the awareness of the accumulated knowledge of who we are and how we got here. 

That knowledge has increased in accuracy tremendously over the last several centuries and it includes everything that came before, from our earliest common ancestor that looked up at the sun being blotted out in the middle of the day and wondered why that happened. 

To add a little to that: 

Materialism means dealing with matter, inert matter. 

When I say we came from matter, that sounds non-spiritual. Let's not forget about energy. This body I inhabit (I'll get back to that bit of language) generates energy. That's why you can touch that screen and it responds. 

I'm not going to veer too far into cosmology. There are many better ways for you to learn about that. But, real quick history of the material universe. 

There was something, or some cosmologists call it nothing (another thing to get back to) then there was spacetime. That burst of energy left behind some matter, mostly hydrogen and helium. The same forces of nature that exist today caused those atoms to combine and change into other atoms then form stars that cooked up a wider variety of elements then planets and eventually life. And there's all the stuff we don't know so we make up names like "dark matter". 

Knowing the details of that billions of years old story may or may not inspire you, confuse you, confound you, or make you laugh because you think it's nuts. 

I will continue on from here with a couple ideas in mind. Call them premises, conclusions of science (which never operates with 100% certainty), basic facts, it's not important. It's actually more important that we agree that we don't know how it works or where it all came from. I'm not seeking ultimate knowledge. I only need the building blocks of the world, the human size things we interact with, not quantum weirdness, and not sure I even need relativity. 

The simple ideas

The forces of nature have remained constant since a few minutes after the point that we call the beginning of time, the Big Bang, the furthest back we can trace the known universe. 

• For most of that time, we (our human ancestors) had no idea how those forces worked. 

Really, most of the time we weren't here. Pre-hominids go back a few million years. Somewhere around 200,000 years ago our species began. Written history can be counted in the 10's of thousands. 

• We (as a species, our ancestors) developed language to describe the forces. 

Gods made thunderbolts, one drove the Sun around, other spirits brought the seasons. Every culture that had a written or oral history has an origin story. 

• That language carried not only attempts at explaining all the life and how it came and went plus the movement of the heavens and the earth, it also carried the values that drove us toward larger tribes, working together to protect ourselves and grow and flourish. 
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• All that led to agriculture, architecture, bridges, aqueducts, sailing, mountain climbing, nations, more languages, and, it gets complicated after that, but it also gets more accessible because we are able to pass on more knowledge and build on it. 

This is where the description of what I'm talking about gets difficult. One way all of this is expressed is "The Pursuit of Happiness", but it took me a while to get comfortable with that, it seems too self-centered and hedonistic. Or, there's "The Survival Instinct", which seems kind of animalistic, dog eat dog. "Spiritual" means something different to just about everyone. 

I used "spiritual" in the title here, so this may be a good place to end the introduction. I've laid out a direction, a beginning at least, and pointed to the hazards of the discussion ahead. We'll see.